The Red Dragon (Will Show The Way)
by childliketendencies
Summary: When Arthur finally returns from the Isle of Avalon, with a new sense of purpose and the knowledge of his destiny filling his heart and mind, he finds a changed world waiting for him - and Merlin isn't part of it. But all is not as it seems, and fulfilling his destiny this time around might be impossible when he finds Merlin at the core of all trouble
1. Prologue

_**A/N: This story idea came to me last night at 4am, after trying to think of a story that had a Dark!Merlin modern setting in any kind of capacity and failing to remember reading any before. Which my overproductive brain decided was a situation that had to be remedied at once and came up with this. It's my very first Merlin fic, and I apologize for the odd and antiquated (and quite stilted) way Arthur expresses himself in. He'll need some time to adjust to modern English.**_

_**I don't know how fast I'll be able to update this, but I'm having fun writing it so I'm hoping it'll progress quickly. Expect not to hear much from Merlin directly for a few episodes - it's up to Arthur to figure out what's happened with his old friend while he was gone, and come to terms with the past. I promise, the mysteries that he'll come across will probably only be really frustrating to him, while he's still missing some clues. You'll be provided with those in other ways, long before he'll get there.**_

_**Please feel free to leave comments and tell me what you think!**_

* * *

_**~ Prologue ~**_

_The first thing that penetrates the fog that constitutes his mind is the absence of wetness. _

_Not that it greatly surprises him at this point, but the last thing he consciously remembers looking at had been the lake and the island within, before Merlin's anguished eyes had filled his horizon. _

_He remembers the sight of the lake and the smell of the water like it's barely been a second ago. As clearly as he remembers the air in his lungs suddenly feeling too thin, the taste of metallic blood coating the back of his throat. The dull thudding of his fading heartbeat. And the absolute clarity that settled on his bones that this – this! – was the end. This was a death he could no longer escape._

_The same clarity fills him now. Clarity of limbs, of emotion, of an inner sense of purpose._

_(Though the purpose may still elude him a little, but he knows it is there. This is his destiny.)_

_So he strides forth, his barenaked feet parting blades of grass, stomping on the sodden earth where once had been the still waters of the lake that carried him hence . He strides onwards. He strides home._

_(There is no shadow of a doubt that he will find him there, waiting. For that, too, is his destiny.)_

* * *

He woke up to the sound of a whisper in the air, and immediately felt crushed under the weight of his own elation. But the whisper turned into words, and the words failed at familiarity, and the catatonic surge of happiness drowned in the heaviness of his heart that seemed to want to sink him back into the earth that had spit him out.

(Had it, really? The timeless void of Avalon seemed nothing else now; what had been there had faded like the waters of the lake that once was.)

The words would not stop. He couldn't make them out. They made no sense to him, even as he pushed the bitter disappointment aside and tried to understand.

"Heló? Mister? Wyt ti'n iawn? Ydych chi ar ddihun?"

Still heavy of mind and desperately unwilling to face this kind of reality, Arthur lay still. As long as he'd keep his eyes firmly shut, he could still belie the odd sense of dread that had overcome him ever since he'd stepped ashore to find himself in a changed world.

(A world full of roaring angular-shaped beasts, that had arrogantly flaunted their transparent stomach's undigested contents at him as they'd rushed past and given him his first sight of the evil he was to battle . What manner of creature was it that would so callously give their prey a glimpse of their immediate future in its belly? Finding himself without his trusty sword, he'd taken cover behind a hedge to wait until the beasts were no longer afoot, but they'd been relentless in their onslaught, and he'd found himself succumbing to the weariness of his changed state of being.)

"Wyt ti'n iawn?"

As foreign as the tongue seemed, there was finally something his ears seemed to detect that hinted at a possibility he hadn't yet considered.

Could it be but a jest?

After all, had not Merlin always delighted in making him look a fool? Though he would consider the occasion one of poor taste, perhaps it was nought but Merlin's way of helping them overcome the gravity of their situation, by playing up the strangeness of their new encounter and pretending to be someone else.

Was this then Merlin's welcome? A show of mummery and foreign tongues?

Arthur ripped open his eyes, convinced to find the eyes of his former servant looking back at him right then. Merlin with the impish smile. The glib tongue and foul humour. The insolent jabs at his sense of self-entitlement.

(Merlin with the wisdom of the sages. The true and pure heart. The unwavering loyalty. None of which he thinks he ever deserved, for haven't his failings been too great for that?)

And as he blinked his eyes to adjust to the darkness of night time and waited for the blurredness to slowly fade from his sight, his heart drumming an exulted beat inside his chest, he knew he wasn't going to be angry with him for even such elaborate a ruse, because all that mattered, truly, was that they were both here. King and servant reconciled.

(Though one now less than a king, and the other much more than servant.)

And though the eyes that his own finally met were smaller than he remembered, and though the face they belonged to was that of a mere child of perhaps 10 years, they were unmistakably Merlin's. He couldn't stop the bubble of pure joy soaring In his heart anymore than the grin erupting on his face or the motion of his hand as it reached out to sink into the unruly mop of dark hair and shake the boy's head in mock anger.

"Oh Merlin! Can't even respect such a grave and momentuous event as this!"

He missed the boy's reaction as he pulled him down towards his own chest to grasp him in an embrace, and didn't think twice before admitting to him what had been in his heart since before he'd risen from the Isle. "It gladdens my heart to see you, old friend. Even in such a form as this."

But as he went to ruffle the boy's head once more with all the affection he could now afford, the child wriggled free of his embrace, and pushed himself off from the earth and him. With panicked eyes and an open mouth the boy stared down at Arthur for another long moment, as if his mind was still trying to digest what had been said and done.

As the boy stood over him, realisation dawned that though the boy was similar enough in looks to Merlin, he had not the sorceror's other familiar features, nor did his frightened, half-glazed stare show any kind of recognition.

Then the boy let forth an unearthly scream – upon which Arthur promptly lost consciousness.

But there was that split second before his mind followed him back into the darkness, where with a measure of satisfaction he took note of the fact that the boy, like Merlin, could do magic.

* * *

_*** translated from Welsh: "Hello? Mister? Are you ok? Are you awake?"_


	2. Chapter 2: Guilt

**_A/N: I've posted this chapter as chapter 1 & 2 over on AO3, because the first part was done a week ago and I wanted to get it over with, but I'm posting both together here because it simply makes more sense that way._**

**_I'd like to mention that you should all simply assume that the two people in this chapter are having the entire conversation in Welsh. I could've tried to post it all in that and then added the translations at the bottom, but with more than just two lines of text that whole checking for translations thing gets really annoying. So simply use your imagination here! (Also, the boy didn't understand Arthur simply because Arthur would be using a very antiquated version of English at this point)_**

* * *

**Chapter 1: Guilt**

The house that stood at the other end of the hedge was small by modern standards, and it wasn't much to look at. Its rough stone façade could have done with a fresh coat of whitewash – here and there bits of white still shone through from previous attempt, and moss and lichen crept in varying shades of green and yellow from the cracks in the grey stone. In the murky dusk of the dying day it looked sickly and decaying; the light that barely made it through glass panes gone milky with old age in their crimson frames lost itself between the drying hulks of greyish lavender that grew from a sea of chipped pots covering every inch of every window sill.

The evening air was heavy with dew and pressed down onto the small two-storey cottage that lay hidden away against a small of wood of dark firs, where gusts of wind would ever so often stir the thick branches and make the wood creak and groan like an old man stretching his achy limbs. Small drops of moisture pooled on the slate-grey shingles that messily covered the roof beneath the trees, and ran down in thin rivulets to softly drip, drip, drip down into the abyss, to splash with unrelenting force onto the ground below, where centuries of drop upon drop had whittled a thin indent into the mossy grey rock the house sat upon. Indeed, in the dim light of falling dusk the house appeared to have been raised out of that rock, to have been pulled out with mighty force and abandoned then to break and crack into each separate stone over the long years of its existence.

A thin trail of gravel led away from a doorway painted crimson, to a rocky outgrowth that could have been, in days long gone by, a set of stone steps. At the bottom of these a downtrodden path meandered through the unkempt sea of grass and ferns down a gentle slope; past a sinister circle of broken standing stones, past a gnarled tree full of abandoned branches, past brambles overgrowing the ruins of an old stone wall; to meet the battered old iron gate in a gap of the hedge that circled the house and the garden.

This was the path that the boy took as he ran away from the stranger huddled behind the hedge by the gate. His legs already too long and gangly for someone of no more than ten years, he stumbled once or twice before catching himself and running on; his breath sounding impossibly loud, ragged in the stillness at the top of the slope. The boy could feel the racing drum of the heart beating in his chest, echoed by the pulsing of the blood rushing in his ears; fear and excitement both rushed through his veins. But as he halted inside the door frame to the house, he was overcome with a different kind of dread that made his heart feel like a tiny thing in his chest: it was a guilty kind of dread, a sickening, sinking-feeling kind of dread instilled by broken rules and, much worse, broken promises. For a moment, the hand that had already begun twisting the coppery-green handle on the door stilled, and the boy stared at his own reflection in the gold-stained glass that adorned the center of the door. A golden-hued face looked back: a face still soft and undefined in its features – a face of pale skin underneath dark, close-cropped hair. Nothing exceptional about it, nothing unusual. But with the stirring of anguish in the boy's eyes, the baby-faced softness of childhood seemed to shrink away, giving a hint of the high cheekbones and narrow-bridged nose, of sharp eyes and a sharper jawline that the boy would surely once grow into. And as quick as it had come, the anguish vanished from his eyes, giving way to the quieter fear, and a sense of acceptance.

With a sharp twist of his wrist, the boy opened the door fully; the last flutter of anguish disappeared with the hiss of an indrawn breath, before he advanced. And then stopped and exhaled with a roll of his eyes.

Leaning a hand against the wall just inside the front door, he carelessly pulled first one, then the other foot out of his muddy shoes; his thin brows creasing on his forehead, he studied the cast-offs critically for a moment before bending down and setting them onto the piece of newspaper that still bore the mudprints of an earlier occupation. A moment later his socks followed, getting thrown on top of the shoes as he straightened up.

With yet another sigh, the boy took another few steps forward and crossed the threshold into the next room, where he knew his mother was still sitting, thinking him long gone upstairs and out of the way of any trouble.

* * *

"Couldn't sleep?"

His mom's voice carried the warm smile with it that he knew was stretched across her face, all the way from the dimple that always etched itself onto her cheek to the crinkle of the soft skin beneath her eyes. He wasn't actually ready to meet those eyes yet, and studiously looked at a thread of greyish lint on the dusty floorboards in the space between her feet.

"Nooooo," he finally mumbled in response, when it occurred to him that an answer was required if he didn't want to arouse suspicion.

The piece of lint slowly twirled around as if caught in a sleepy dance of swirling air, before coming to rest once again against the tattered tassels of the ancient grey blanket that hung down from the sofa.

If he'd had any hope in him that he could truly fool his mother – who was all-knowing – it was thoroughly deflated with her next words.

"Did you at least remember to wear a coat this time? It's too cold outside for you to run around in the dark with just your night things on."

He swallowed around the lump in his throat that had suddenly, miraculously appeared at her words, and raised his eyes to meet hers. The sound of her voice filled his heart anew with that dread of before – despite the light-heartedness of her words, the mix of exasperation and amusement, it reminded the child too much of similar moments in the past, of all the times he'd disappointed her before, that all she felt capable of now was this weary acceptance of his misbehavior.

The guilt he'd felt earlier now pushed its way through once again. He couldn't keep the eye contact she'd established with her words – the blue tint of her eyes was too hard, too full of the words that wouldn't pass her lips anymore, and she didn't yet know the worst.

That she stretched out her hand in silent beckoning was something he felt rather than saw; after a moment of just staring at his own toes and wishing this could be over already, he gave himself a little push and started forward. None of this was inevitable anymore. There were going to be angry words and bitter tears, and guilt and reproach, and disappointment - so much disappointment once again.

It wasn't as if he wanted any of it, but sometimes – sometimes it was just impossible to stick to the promise. It wasn't something he could simply stop any more than he could stop himself from scratching his nose if it itched.

He'd never tried to explain that to her. Even when she'd sat him down and talked to him and made him promise, he'd not told her that he didn't know how to do that. Sure – he knew how to behave, and he knew discipline and manners, like any good kid; but in spite of feeling too old for his body sometimes, he was just a kid: a kid who wanted to play and enjoy himself – who wanted to test his limits, to misbehave and make mistakes. It was difficult to be a kid around his mother, when all she seemed to see sometimes was the shadow of his dad lurking in his bones.

Her arm folded around his middle - he'd grown a lot this last year – and pulled him closer; awkwardly, he twisted around within her embrace and sat down on his accustomed place on her thighs. Even then she wasn't satisfied: her hand moving all the way up his back she let it rest on his left shoulder and softly, unyieldingly drew his head down until all he could do was lean sideways into her body and rest his head against hers. It wasn't a comfortable position, as tense and wary as he felt inside at that moment, but the faint flowery scent of her golden hair and the unmistakable smell of everything that was her wrapped him up and made him want to forget all his troubles. After a moment of fighting against it, he felt some of the tension leave his body and he sagged against her, accepting that there was no way to escape now.

It would have been very easy to simply ignore everything and let the matter stand where it was; she'd seen through his ruse and had accepted his misbehaviour. There wasn't any need to mention what else had happened – to mention the stranger in the grass down by the gate, and the oddness of his behaviour; certainly no need to tell her he'd done far worse than break the rules tonight. And yet – here in her arms, cocooned against her body, with her scent filling his nose and his hands twisting into the soft crimson of her knitted cardigan, he found himself overcome with the urge to tell her all.

"I saw a man down by the gate," he mumbled into her hair.

It took a moment for her to absorb his words; when she did, he could feel the tension overtaking her body ripple by ripple until the embrace that had lost all its softness pulled him from that close contact they'd just had. And suddenly it felt as if every bone in her body had just hardened beneath him, and he was sitting on stone instead of warm flesh and skin and cloth.

She didn't make a sound when she pulled his head further away from hers and turned him by the shoulder so she could look at his face. A slight quiver of her thin nostrils underlined the tension in her body, and for a moment he thought he saw fear in her overly large eyes that had lost their usual almond shape and appeared like twin orbs of piercing blue shadowed by brows creased with worry.

"A man? What kind of a man?" Her voice sounded off, like she was holding in a breath and had to squeeze the words out past it. When he made no immediate effort to reply, he felt her fingernails dig into his shoulders where her hands gripped him now like a vice.

He hadn't quite known how to respond to that; for a moment he couldn't comprehend how the mere mention of a man might make her this scared. For that moment he lacked all comparison, as if his mind just drew a blank.

But a second later, his gaze still latched onto hers, a flash of remembrance jarred his memory and conjured up the image of the man she was afraid he'd seen: tall, thin, dark-haired, fair-skinned, a narrow face with prominent cheekbones and blue eyes that held too much power. His father.

The image wavered and stretched, and then broke free; like a high, piercing scream it tore through him, filled every fibre of his being with something horrid, something dark and foul and terrible that he finally recognised as the source of all pain that she had ever been made to feel. A pain so vast it made everything he himself had ever caused her seem null and void instead, and explained everything about that fear, if not the pain.

And then she blinked, and the shadow of the emotion he'd felt a second ago left nothing behind but a sick feeling at the pit of his stomach and the knowledge that he couldn't let her know what he'd seen.

"Uhh… a beggar, or something," he said, finally, and managed to sound unnaturally cheerful and light. "He really smelled bad, like old fish. He had no shoes and was wearing this weird nightdress thing like old Mr Pryderi down in the village. Oh and he was blond."

The instant he mentioned the hair colour her fingernails stopped digging into his shoulders and some of the tension left her. Some – but not all. Her gaze was just as unrelenting as before.

"What did he do? Did he talk to you?"

"Ehh, he wasn't doing anything, just lying there under the hedge so I thought he was maybe dead or something but when I got close I could see he was breathing and all, so I thought he was asleep or sick because his eyes were closed and he was making this weird achy kind of scrunched up face, anddddd-"

He didn't get further in his rambling description of what he'd found down by the hedge. She cut him off with a shake to his shoulders that made his head snap back and forth and almost bite his tongue as he got stuck on his last word. Suppressing the childish urge to say "oww" like he'd actually hurt himself, he watched her expression flicker from fear to anger, and back to something like fear – but of a different kind than before. At least he'd pushed his dad from her mind, then.

"This man was inside our garden?"

"Uhh yes," he said, and then added a little hesitantly, "… and he's - I mean, I'm pretty sure he's still there now. He woke up and talked some weird gibberish."

The way he saw it, there was no need to mention that the crazy man in the garden had actually held him in a tight lock against his chest for a while before he'd managed to pull out from that. He'd not gotten any sense of menace coming from the stranger, and didn't think the poor man deserved any more punishment than what he'd already gotten from him just for mistaking him for someone else. From what he knew of the world – and especially old Mr Pryderi from the village who never spent a sober night in all of the time he'd known him – the beggar had been drunk, and simply looking for shelter to sleep it off.

"And then what?"

Her fingernails were back to digging into his shoulders again, but he barely registered what little bit of pain it caused. For this was the bit he'd dreaded, and now that they were back on familiar 'you-must-not-speak-to-complete-strangers-in-the-dark-or-accept-their-candy' – territory, the tendrils of guilt pushed their way back into his mind.

"Uhh…. He tried to pull me to him … and then… ipushedhimawayandknockedhimo utkinda."

She tilted her head forward and stared at him in puzzlement, her right eye squinting as her mind tried picking the words apart. There was the first hint of understanding settling on her face when the furrow between her brows grew deeper and the squinting turned into a narrowing of both eyes. The hands that were still clutching her cardigan started to feel clammy and cold, as if the dread of her realisation and the repercussions of that were slowly draining him of all bodily warmth.

Closing his eyes and shutting out the dawning of clarity on her face seemed like a really brilliant idea just then; he really didn't want to look into her eyes right then. So he did, and simply sat there, his heart thumping louder and louder in chis chest with every second that passed.

And the silence grew, and with it, his guilt.

Finally, when it seemed almost too much to bear, he sensed her move against him a second before he felt the touch of her forehead against his and her arms twisting around his neck and shoulders. At the same time, there was a long hiss of breath exhaling and the slight gust of hot air against his cheek, and he realised that she must've held in the air for a bit. But even after her breath had hitched for a few seconds he heard her breathe in once more, and a series of even breaths followed as she kept them both in place on her lap. And instead of the angry words that he'd been waiting for with that sickening sinking feeling, nothing happened.

Curiosity finally overcoming him at this odd change to her usual behaviour, he opened his eyes to find himself looking at her own closed ones – and the sight of a tear slowly rolling down her left cheek. This worried him.

"Ma?"

She opened her eyes and looked back into his, and he didn't know how to interpret the emotion he read in them. Like with her fear earlier, he had no comparison for this; and this time her mind stayed closed off to his.

When she finally spoke, her voice was near silent, a mere whisper; as if the last few minutes had cost her too much to be able to fully function just yet.

"Oh cariad," she breathed, and her hands were suddenly right there on his face, trembling fingers that only stilled when she touched the skin on his cheeks and held his face like in an embrace. "I know what I made you promise me, and how terribly difficult that is to keep. But this once, this one time, I don't fault you for breaking it. He obviously meant you harm, and you did the only thing you could do; and I cannot find fault with that at all."

His own eyes felt too large for his face as he processed her words and realised he was not only forgiven his misdeed but apparently also praised for it.

"Now, you stay here and let me handle this."

She let go of his face first, then in one swift move softly deposited him on the spot next to her on the grey sofa. Before he could even comprehend fully what was happening she'd jumped up from her own spot, and grabbed her mobile from the rickety book shelf next to the sofa. It was when she'd left the room and he heard her making noise down the hall in the kitchen, that he finally realised that she meant to go out there and look at the man herself; indeed, when she re-entered the room she was clasping a heavy cast-iron pan by the wooden handle, and flipping open her mobile with her free hand to dial a short number and mouth "police" at him as she held the phone to her ear.

This was all happening too fast for him. There was something about this situation that was utterly wrong, but he couldn't tell how he knew that other than by some strange instinct.

"Ma – wait!"

He didn't know if it was the same kind of instinct that made him call out his next words, or just dumb luck, for nothing else could have as effectively stopped the world from turning as this.

"Listen ma, don't call the police - I think the guy was just looking for someone – I think he mistook me for someone, he kept calling me by some name, kept saying Merlin to me, like he-"

There was a massive crash right outside the door, then a reverberating clang and the sound of something small hitting the floor – and then all went silent. He was off the sofa in a second, scrambling to his feet and almost at the other side of the room when his mother's face -white as a sheet and eyes larger than any other time that evening – appeared in the doorframe.

She held on to the frame for support and he noticed with relief that her mobile (as well as the pan) was gone from her hands.

"M-Merlin?"

He checked his memory but remembered it no different. In a way, the stranger's voice calling out that name had never left him, he realised now. "Yes. Why? Who's that?"

A long moment of silence followed as he watched her stare at him, and through him. The silence grew thick and heavy with a new kind of tension before she finally replied with a shaky voice: "It's no one, cariad – just a ghost from the past."

This intrigued him much more than any of her behaviour confused him right now. "Is it like Merlin from the book? The sorcerer at King Arthur's court?" But why would she call that one a 'ghost from the past'?

At that, another strange flicker of emotion crossed her face.

"Oh Gods!" she called out. But before he could ask any more, she gave him another beseeching look to stay where he was, then turned and left the house.

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**_A/N #2: Please feel free to comment to your heart's delight (and mine!)_**


	3. Chapter 3: Confusion

A/N: Sorry about the long delay. There's been too much illness and long work hours. I'll make it up, I promise. Next chapter's already in the works.

* * *

When he came to his time around, it was to the curious sensation of warmth caressing his face. It made the rest of his body with all the aches and pains and the coldness creeping into his bones from the earth below seem oddly detached from his head. With consciousness seeping slowly back into his brain, it was his heart that first responded to the touch, the familiarity of the sensation stirring up a bitter taste in his mouth.

_(The whispered "Stay with me," the words reaching into his fraying mind, turning into something more as they invade his consciousness and send a jolt through his nerves; a desperate command to his soul as they course through him and leave him wanting more, wanting to make one last effort to hold on. And for one more moment, with every fibre of his being he wants this: wants to believe that this is not the end, to trust in this magic that tries to keep up the fight for his life, to hold on to that desperate hope that he can be saved. For that one moment he finds his vision swimming, bringing back into focus that pair of tearful eyes, golden flecks still dancing through the blue, and those trembling lips that curl into a shadow of a smile that's so familiar and heart-warming. But the desolation in those eyes, the grief that turns the smile into a grimace, puts lies to all hope Merlin had tried to instill his words with, and with all the clarity that this one short burst of power has returned to him he knows – _knows_ – that this is the end. The surety of it settles over his body like a blanket, bereaves him of vision and numbs his mind, until nothing remains but the sound of those last three whispered words that were never more than an anguished plea by a defeated man stripped of all hope long before an enchanted sword inflicted a fatal wound.)_

"Couldn't let me die, you said," he mumbled as the memory left him, and turned into the too-soft touch of the fingers caressing his face, his eyes tightly shut against a world that else held too much unfamiliarity. He didn't know – didn't care – didn't want to believe in anything other than what his weary body wanted to believe right now.

_(Who other than Merlin would care to touch him like this? would cradle his face now like he had then?)_

"Yet you were mourning me long before that day," he continued muttering, trying hard and yet failing to keep the twinge of reproach out of his voice. He realized he was babbling, trying to fill the moment with something they could both latch onto because it was old, it was familiar, even as he knew that it would never be that simple again. "You'd known… You'd known about Mordred, about Camlann – about Morgana. And yet you'd hoped that you could change my fate, hadn't you? That's what you meant when you came to me, when you told me about your…. You said you'd always known it was Mordred you had to look out for. You'd known I'd die. But you couldn't let me."

The soft caressing touch had stilled upon his words. He wanted them to continue, wanted to feel that security that everything was going to be alright again, but with every word that spilled from his lips he was making it harder to maintain. And yet he couldn't seem to stop himself.

"You tried so hard. Not just when all was lost already – you tried to warn me, to caution me against Mordred and Morgana, and when that failed, to instill in me the wisdom to see beyond my own beliefs. But I didn't listen enough. For all your magic could do, it was powerless against my prattishness."

Even as his mind followed that thought he realized that, as much as he'd said it out of humour, it was no more but the truth. The silence that followed did naught but confirm it as it grew longer, bereft of his babbling. A silence that was made more so as the hands that had held him fell away entirely.

"He said 'Arthur's bane is himself'."

It was no more than a whisper in the air beside him. A whisper tinged with too many things to pluck apart at once, but his heart responded to it with a fluttering drumbeat that rippled along his veins until it filled his ears with a rushing, roaring sense of relief.

_(And yet he still dared not open his eyes, for fear of waking and finding this naught but a fragment of a dream.)_

"Who said…?" was what he dared to ask instead after a long moment's deliberation that did nothing but fill him with wretched curiosity.

"Merlin."

His eyes flew open, and his vision swam as it focused on the outline of the person looming over him. It wasn't Merlin, that much was terribly, desperately clear, but the face that he found looking down on him when he finally, finally could see clearly was still a familiar one. It was a face that he'd truly never expected to see again - a face that was as much a product of magic as Merlin was.

"Mother?"

* * *

It wasn't until some time later, after the woman - who had introduced herself as Nerys Emerson once she'd corrected his mistake - led him up a narrow set of stairs to a bedchamber and bade him sit on a stool, he dared deal with the confusion that had started to feel like it was eroding his mind.

He'd let her do whatever she wanted with him while he was still trying to get over the shock of his mistake; she'd taken him to her house and set food in front of him and watched him eat, all without another word of explanation. Instead, she'd offered him small talk: how high the grass was growing in the garden while they'd walked along the path to the house, how badly the house needed a new coat of whitewash when she'd opened her front door to him, how simple the stew was compared to what he must have been used to. He'd not managed more than brusque, simple answers, finding it almost impossible to think of anything else but setting one foot in front of another, or swallowing down the stew that he couldn't seem to taste. If she'd found his short replies rude, she'd never shown any of it; indeed, she'd been nothing but kind and understanding of his plight, as if she'd known how much pain his mistake had made him feel - and how much of a disappointment he'd suffered because of it.

For disappointment it had been, and doubly so; first, the brief glimpse of another possibility when he'd thought her his mother snatched away by Nerys' apologetic introduction of herself, followed by the jarring reality that he'd mistaken the woman twice, and Merlin had never been there.

All this time since, he'd tried not to dwell on his confusion, instead having simply let himself drift along with his new circumstances. But now, alone with this woman who at once seemed too familiar and too alien, listening to her soothing voice explain to him about water that came from pipes and vanished down others, it felt like he could breathe a little easier, think a little clearer. It was when she was preparing the bed she had offered him, moving to and fro between a trunk and the bed itself, bringing out linens and blankets and busying herself in ways that reminded him too much of Merlin and yet not enough, that he finally found himself able to focus his thoughts trying to find answers on one thing at a time.

It's Merlin he'd expected to see, and Merlin she'd spoken of, so there had to be something more he could learn of the missing man from her. He told himself Merlin could surely not have survived the centuries, and he'd been bereft of his mind to expect else; and yet – there had been something in the way his host had spoken of Merlin.

_(There is something about her looking too much like the mother he's only seen in a magical dream once, too, but he isn't yet ready to deal with the strangeness of that. But for now, he simply tries to ignore that.)_

"You spoke of Merlin as of someone you know."

He spoke slowly, having found that it was easier for her to understand him if he pronounced his words carefully, since it seemed their accents were not too far apart from each other even if hers was softer, rounder than his own and held some words he had never heard before.

"I did."

He very much wanted to simply ask if Merlin was alive, but found his words stilling on his tongue, finding himself afraid of the answer. He tried a different, less direct approach.

"How is it you knew me for who I am?"

"I was – he told me about you. Some things. I read some others. And you showed up here, and were calling out his name. It didn't take much to put two and two together when I found you lying there, seeing your face…"

He watched her hands smoothing down the blanket covering the bed – watched them stroking over the fabric again and again as if trying to keep her hands moving. When she uttered the last words, both hands clutched at the pillow and squeezed it until the knuckles turned white, then let go as if she'd caught herself doing it.

Arthur pulled his eyes up to finally look at the face he'd tried to avoid focusing on.

_(It is difficult. So terribly difficult to look at that face and not remember the last time he's seen it, not remember how those eyes had shone with tenderly love for him, how those lips had grazed his temple. No matter if it had all been an illusion or not, for those few moments then he'd felt that love that he'd been missing his entire life, that warmth; had felt safe and harboured in his mother's embrace. To be able to look at that same face again, and yet know it belonged to someone else... )_

Overcoming the urge to fall to his knees on the ground before her and to throw his arms around her waist like a little boy was hard. When he was finally able to see past it, when he managed to swallow down the bitterness and yearning, he schooled himself to look at her without letting his emotions overcome him. There were things he needed to know, and he'd get to know them with either asking or observing his environment.

_(Let no one say he hasn't learned his lesson now.)_

So he watched her face. Observed her blue eyes as they stared off into space after she'd seemingly forgotten what she'd been saying. There was a jagged crease deepening in the space between her brows the longer the silence grew.

"My face?" he finally asked, hoping to sway her to pick up where she'd left off.

Her eyes focused back on his face then and he found himself under her scrutiny for a long moment, during which something in her mind seemed to give.

"Your face has always been familiar to us."

Something in her expression changed as she said it , and he realized the tiny lines around her eyes that he hadn't noticed before had smoothed out now, and her lips perfected the small smile that had begun in one corner when she'd still been deliberating whatever decision she'd come to now.

_(He _can_ be observant in areas other than the battlefield or council hall, after all.)_

Her words presented him with another mystery, however.

"Who is us?" he asked.

She cast her eyes down onto the ground for a moment, as if to take another moment's respite, and then they swept their clear blue gaze straight to his own in as open and honest a way as he had not seen her take with him before.

"Your family, Arthur Pendragon."

It was as if time had stopped and he could do no else but ask question after question, hoping to bridge the gap to something he could understand once more.

"What family?"

"The family that came from your union with Guinevere, your queen."

_What?_

"We had no -"

"Oh I know you didn't, in your lifetime. But you left your queen with child when you died. The child grew up to be a king, and to start a family of his own, as these things go."

She'd bridged the space between them and come to stand in front of him, only to take his now shaking hands into her own trembling ones. "You were the first generation – and I am the last."

_Do not think of it! Do not think of it! It's too much – don't think!_

He felt himself being led to the bed by her hands, and realised his distress must be showing only too clearly. She sat down next to him and would not let go of his hands. Stupidly he stared at them: at her fingers, wrapped around his own; at her thumb, moving in slow lines back and forth along the ridge of his knuckles; at the two overlaying bands of silver and gold that adorned her ring finger much like they had once adorned his own.

He pulled a hand from her grasp and tentatively touched the golden ring with his thumb. The sudden burning sensation of his eyes turned into tears that he was powerless to hold back. The inner voice of his mind continued its endless drone of , _don't think of it, don't think, just don't, not now, not this, don't think, too much, don't, don't_! but no matter how much he tried to keep his thoughts together, it was as if an invisible hand had thrust into his chest and had his heart grasped too tight, making it almost unbearable to breathe in.

"We had – she had a child…?" he managed to choke out past the sob that threatened to escape his throat.

"You did. A sweet blue-eyed, fair-haired boy with all of his parents' fierce courage and determination." Nerys' voice was softer than before, and she pulled his errant hand back into her grasp – resumed the calming motion of her thumb as if she knew what he needed.

"How do you know this?"

His mind conjured up the image of a boy much like she'd described, but it wouldn't stay fixed. With a terrible pang of misery he realized he couldn't recall Guinevere's face in all its clarity any longer, to help him imagine what a child of both their heritage would look like.

_(Would he have had her darker skin beneath his golden hair?)_

"He told me."

A change of the warm hold on his hands made him drop his still watery gaze onto her hands. It seemed almost absentmindedly that she shifted her fingers around his own to touch the band of shiny metal and give it a twist.

"Merlin?"

"Yes."

Her eyes falling from their hold on his tearstained face to look at her fingers, she stopped the twisting motion as if she'd caught herself.

"He is still alive then?"

The pressure around his heart lightened at the possibility and the question that he'd not dared to ask before rolled off his lips much easier than he'd thought it would. The thought of Merlin's fate, as fearful as he'd been of it just minutes earlier, now seemed a welcome change of topic to his troubled mind.

"He-," she began, and he watched as the warmth of her smile that had remained there all this time turned into something different, something hesitant. "Yes," she finally said, but he hadn't learned enough of her to be able to tell what the changed tone of her voice and the return of the crease between her brows meant other than the thought or mention of Merlin brought her some discomfort.

"Where is he then?"

There was an odd tension entering her small frame, a certain way her shoulders shifted, but he had no way of interpreting its meaning.

"He left."

"Can you not send for him then?"

In lieu of a reply, she stood up and dropped her hold on his hands. Pulling back the blanket on the bed, she stood next to him, waiting, the tension never leaving her shoulders. "You should get some rest, Arthur. Give yourself time to digest all this news. It can't be easy, what you're going through."

He found himself responding to her, slowly rising from his position, giving in to that earlier temptation to let himself be mothered without having to think too much for himself.

But it was when he'd finally settled beneath the blanket – in nothing but his pants, his long shirt now thrown over her arm so she could wash it – that he called out to her once more. A suspicion had crept upon him, and as much as he wondered at what made him think it, he couldn't shake the thought.

"What is he to you, Nerys?"

The woman who, with her golden locks and blue eyes, looked so much like his mother, turned around once more in the doorframe, her hand already on the handle. The grim set of her face now held nothing of the warmth and comforting smile anymore. Her eyes were shut tight, as if the mere thought of what she was about to say was too much to bear.

"He is my husband."

And then she left. And though he found his suspicion confirmed, he couldn't find peace in that.

He didn't understand any of this.


End file.
